Setup Matomo Analytics to Modern SharePoint from any platform

This is an alternative of one of my previous posts about Setup Google Analytics to Modern SharePoint from any platform. Google Analytics means that your organization has to host data about softwares and users into a tierce solution. For some governance, privacy and security reasons, some organization can not use this kind of solutions.‌‌ So, what are the alternatives? Is there another free solution?

No Google Analytics

I have done some research for a while ... I found other interesting analytics tools that I tried on my own blog and SharePoint test environments. Two solutions caught my attention based on the following criteria:

Free: totally free is a must but at least basic features for free

Open-Source: I like the open-source solutions so much! That gives the organization enough flexibilities to improve and customize the solution for their needs. And, incidentally, contribute to this project 🙂

Self-Hosted: of course, if you want to keep a hand on the data, the best solution is the self-hosting. Thanks to this kind of solutions, you can potentially have a compliant GDPR solution too 😉

Google Analytics alternative: is currently a reference in the world of web analytics service. Therefore, I took it as a reference to find solutions that provide sufficient similar features such as real time, several graph, create custom dashboards, maps, etc.

Relatively easy to implement: if you are to present an awesome solution to your customer but he has to spend half of his time and budget to set up the solution itself... hmm, you know what I mean, isn't it? 😕

Open Web Analytics

I tested OWA at first because of several features available for free such as heatmap, mouse click, etc.

After several weeks, I noted that the admin interface was really old, some features did not really work (for my part, I did not manage to make it work "heatmap" for example) and the real time was missing. In addition, I am following the GitHub repository of the solution and I did not see any new fixing issue, enhancement or whatever for a long time...

Set up Docker Matomo server

Since I do not have several servers on hand, I am using Docker containers to have several services, including Matomo that provides a Docker Image that can be quickly configured and implemented into your environment.

Set up Matomo client (SharePoint Framework extension)

Yes, a SPFx extension is provided by Matomo. However, developers can not edit, improve or adapt the solution... That is why I created my own solution and, moreover, a solution that can be quickly and easily provisionned.

I wrote two scripts that will allow you to easily implement the solution 🎁‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌